In addition to any PPC work, it’s worth setting up a companion remarketing campaign.
Many times, campaigns target all users with the same ad and the same bid—users seeing your ad for the first time and users who have seen your ad before, or those who have already visited your site through other channels.
However, segmenting the effort into net new users and remarketing audiences will yield better results with a more granular approach.
Improve your PPC campaign performance and increase your conversion rates with remarketing efforts like RLSA.
But when you do, pay attention to these six dos and don’ts to avoid common pitfalls.
1. Seek scale
Don’t assume there is a large redirectable audience.
Use site analytics data from other channels to measure how many monthly repeat visitors are there overall and by business unit or product to predict available remarketable traffic from your paid search campaigns.
As with any marketing plan, scale is key.
In some cases, you may find that the remarketing volume is actually small.
So if the audience size is small within the typical 30-day window, consider extending it further to 60 or even 90 days.
While 1000 users is the minimum list size in Google Ads, depending on your typical clickthrough rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR), you may need a higher threshold.
For example, if you typically see a CTR of 5% and a CVR of 2%, unfortunately, 1,000 impressions will only result in 0.5 conversions.
In this case, it would take a million impressions to collect 10 conversions, at that level things are still not as impactful, but can get interesting.
2. Don’t just sell – cross-sell and up-sell
A common assumption is that people without deals may need additional incentives in the form of repeat and/or more high-profile messaging. It may be so.
However, in many cases they do gather all the details and decide they don’t need what they think they need.
Many users in the discovery phase are not only researching potential solutions, but also reconfirming that the problem they are seeking to solve is indeed the right problem to solve.
When setting up remarketing, test sales messages and cross-sell or up-sell messages.
Give users more reasons to remember you, especially if your site offers products that are common supplements or supplements.
A sales message needs to say the same thing users have heard before in a different way: a more direct call to action and/or an exclusive one-time offer.
Cross-selling promotes related products, while up-selling encourages users to consider more refined products. They may not end up buying this high-end alternative, but the latter can indirectly highlight the value of the initial option considered.
3. Consider exclusions
Sound obvious? Users who just bought your product or service don’t want to buy again right away. Then again, we’ve all seen companies reposition us with what we just bought.
In general, for most B2C campaigns, converters in the past 7 to 14 days can be safely excluded from all campaigns except those with cross-sell goals.
For the best experience, consider the elapsed time of the service. The delay before re-trading will vary by product category.
Aspects such as seasonality, target location, and target ROI will further influence the desired frequency of target repeat users.
For example, someone who booked a summer vacation might not be able to buy from you again for several months. One might argue that one’s planning and consideration would start earlier.
However, prematurely purchased media can result in significant incremental costs that can lower your target ROI.
With this, if the aim is to incentivize past converts to buy more of the same from you, it often makes sense to wait a while before retargeting them.
On the other hand, cross-selling can take place immediately after the deal, but it also needs to be carefully managed and cannot last too long.
Establish a cut-off threshold, especially when the use of the product makes the add-on irrelevant.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to upsell travelers on car rentals or room upgrades after the vacation begins. After about a month of buying a cellphone plan, it’s unlikely that the converter will want to upgrade to a wider plan.
4. Go long
Remarketing is often considered a short-term strategy for cart abandoners or recent website visitors.
However, it is possible to remarket to users who last visited the site a year ago.
Loyalty building is often overlooked when it comes to acquiring new customers.
Consider consumption patterns and seasonality.
If someone booked spring break with you, when will they start planning next? What is the update cycle of the software you provide?
5. Synergies with other channels
By default, search remarketing will remarket to all users who have visited your website.
In other words, you’ll target people who have visited your site through other channels—after seeing a display ad, interacting on social media, from an email blast, etc.—as well as organic search and direct visits.
Consider the information people see and build on that.
If you feel particularly advanced (and the scale supports it), create a remarketing campaign by channel or channel group.
6. No extra budget required
This will make many CMOs happy. In the beginning, you don’t need an additional remarketing budget.
Remember, this is all about people your current campaigns have already captured. Just isolate those repeat searchers and create a new experience for them.
However, these are the same users you’ve already targeted.
Of course, you may want to be more aggressive in finding these users and sending bid corrections for these audiences.
That said, unless your remarketing audience is large and/or you want a big increase in your CTR, you don’t need to increase your budget.
Additional budget for remarketing is nice, but in the short term, it’s not necessary. Never set up some initial tests.
take away
With cookie deprecation looming and a growing emphasis on first-party data, remarketing efforts are well aligned with this new direction.
Remarketing solutions align very well with supporting first-party data initiatives.
Whether you’re using email to build your audience, or using a form to capture user details on a landing page at the start of the conversion journey, structure your remarketing efforts for a win-win: first, work on increasing conversions, then work with the effort Drive synergies to capture first-party data.
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